The Loss of Institutional Autonomy at the Center of the Crisis of Academic Freedom in the US

Columbia University faculty protesting against the settlement between their university and the government, as a violation of institutional autonomy, on March 24, 2025. Photo credit: The New York Times.

The 2026 update of the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) was published on March 17, 2026. Based on a dataset that measures academic freedom levels across 179 countries, the most recent iteration of the yearly report demonstrated once again the growing scale and intensity of attacks on academic freedom around the world. The report not only showed that countries experiencing declines in academic freedom vastly outnumber those that saw improvements in 2025, 9 improving vs. 50 declining, but also noted that declines were happening in many countries that used to have robust protections of academic freedom just ten years ago. As academic freedom faces threats worldwide, places that are considered the safe havens of academic freedom are also becoming fewer and fewer.

The AFI is based on the evaluations of more than 2,000 country experts of five components of academic freedom: freedom to research and teach, freedom of academic exchange and dissemination, and freedom of academic and cultural expression as individual-level indicators, as well as institutional autonomy and campus integrity as institution-level indicators. This year’s report focused on the importance of institutional autonomy, understood as “the degree to which higher education institutions are able to govern themselves without undue interference from the state or other external, non-academic actors,” for understanding the erosion of academic freedom. While declines in institutional autonomy are outnumbered by declines in individual-level factors, data indicate that institutional autonomy is positively correlated with individual-level variables, meaning that declines in the autonomy of higher education institutions could likely be followed by further declines in the other indicators. Institutional autonomy is key for the freedoms to research, teach, and exchange since it is very often universities that are responsible for providing individuals with physical and institutional spaces in which to exercise their freedoms.

While institutional autonomy was found to be in decline in many liberal democratic countries, the report singled out the case of the United States as one of “fast and steep deterioration.” The scale and speed of the decline of institutional autonomy not only outpace declines in Western Europe and North America, but they are happening even more rapidly than cases such as Hungary, India, and Turkey, countries that have experienced significant levels of democratic backsliding in the last decade. In the last five years, the institutional autonomy score of the US has fallen by around 50%, with the country now being categorized as having “moderate autonomy.” The report noted that the decline of institutional autonomy in the US started in 2020 with state-level attacks, which were later combined with federal efforts in 2025, demonstrating “how quickly institutional autonomy can be damaged via coercive executive action.”

The US federal government initially launched its campaign against academic freedom and the higher education sector in Spring 2025, weaponizing federal funding and investigations to coerce universities to implement policies and institutional changes in line with its demands. Examples include the settlement between Columbia University and the federal government in which Columbia agreed to pay more than $200 million, as well as to implement changes to campus governance and the institutional structure of the university, in return for the restoration of federal funding and the ending of discrimination investigations. A year after the start of this campaign, the intensity of attacks has decreased, but by no means ended, with the slowing down of the attack being at least partially attributable to the government having already succeeded in some of its goals. Since November 2025, the Trump administration has been engaged in a legal conflict with University of Pennsylvania over the university’s refusal to put together a list of its Jewish employees and hand it over to the government. A federal judge is set to rule soon on whether the government’s subpoena for such employee records must be enforced.

Another major way in which the federal government has been undermining institutional autonomy is the targeting of students with visa revocations and deportations. Most recently, on February 26, 2026, a Columbia University student was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers from her university housing. The university said that it did not willingly allow the ICE officers inside, instead claiming that the ICE officers lied to campus security that they were police officers looking for a five-year-old missing child in order to gain access to the building. The student was released from ICE custody later that day, following New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s conversation with President Trump asking for the student’s release.

However, as the AFI 2026 Update Report underlined, only part of the erosion of institutional autonomy can be attributed to the federal government, with a significant portion of attacks being carried out at the state level. From course content to tenure conditions and hiring, fundamental aspects of university governance are being increasingly subjected to interventions by state-level politicians. State politicians have been especially restrictive of course content in Texas, where university systems have been introducing complex course review processes intending to filter out gender- and race-related content from classes based on state legislation that places restrictions on the teaching of these subjects. Texas is also one of the states, alongside others such as Florida, Ohio, and Indiana, where academic tenure protections are being undermined. While these states have introduced new post-tenure review requirements in recent years, Republican Oklahoma Governor J. Kevin Stitt issued a directive in early February 2026 phasing out tenure for faculty members at public universities. Following the new directives, tenured faculty will be replaced by non-tenured academics upon the retirement of currently tenured faculty members. Finally, earlier this year, Texas issued a one-year ban on H1-B petitions for hires at public universities, preventing higher education institutions in Texas from hiring faculty members from outside of the US. The Florida Board of Governors followed, issuing a similar ban for Florida public colleges, preventing them from hiring professors on H1-B visas for eight months.

Endangered Scholars Worldwide (ESW) condemns ongoing attacks on the institutional autonomy of universities and colleges in the United States, at the federal and state levels. Institutional autonomy, or the ability of universities to govern themselves free of outside intervention, is a crucial and fundamental component of academic freedom. Political interventions into university governance, institutional structure, course content, as well as rules around tenure protections and hiring, constitute serious violations of the principle of institutional autonomy, which is the basis of the existence of higher education institutions as places of free inquiry and knowledge production. We call on the federal government of the United States, as well as state-level politicians and leaders, to roll back their attempts to project undue influence on universities. We invite the global community to join our call.